Thursday, February 13, 2020

Enterprise LAN Routing andSwitching

In networking, switching and routing refers basically to packet management over a LAN or a WAN. Through different switching technologies that are crucial to network design, switches allow traffic to be sent only where it is needed in most cases, using fast, hardware-based methods. On the other side, routing is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic (the packets).

User Benefits

The classical role of routers and switches evolved once with the more and more dynamic and complexity required today. Adding on top of it the business and performance requirements, this mix has rewritten the roles of the traditional switch and router respectively.

Business Impact

Thus, independent of the purpose it serves, an infrastructure should be designed with the following principles:

·         Open architecture – allow integration with other technologies – e.g.: security, application delivery from different vendors

·         Resilience – the infrastructure should be robust enough to withstand to a change of any kind to regular or forecasted behavior

·         Service-oriented – the architecture should follow the application delivery principles – e.g.: Service Oriented Architecture - rather than just packet forwarding.

·         Easy to manage – the less operating systems and versions in the network, the less the effort to manage it and less risk of service outage induced by different versions of operating systems in the network.

To all the above requirements, there are also specific requirements to each environment the infrastructure is deployed.

In Data Centers, the infrastructure should be regarded as a unified data center fabric between the applications within the data center and the users. Other principles that would apply in the Data Center could also be:

·         Reduced power and cooling requirements

·         Application consolidation through virtualization leads help desk tech salary automatically to application-to-application communication within the Data Center – this translates into distributed chassis and aggregation

·         Service SLA leads to application QoS mechanisms to be enforced, rather than packet based QoS.

In the Government arena, there are various compliance requirements which lead to supplemental security integration.

For all these reasons above, the infrastructure has to be built with applications in mind.

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